A VISION OF STANDARDIZATION

Anyone who set out to create a database of a museum collection meet the problem having to deal with a wide range of fields within monetary history. Three hundred years of numismatic scholarship has given an immensely important litterature which serve as a basis for what we know about the history of coins and money today. It has also given us a wide range of ways and words to describe a coin, medal or other piece related to the field of numismatics. As the habit/trend earlier was to do otherwise than scholars in the past (and still is), the problem now is partly to tie these differences together, choose a way to describe an item and to pick what terms is to be used. Is the national way of spelling their rulers and mints names acceptable for those part of another language-family? Hardly if the database aim at beeing applied and used by people outside the world of numismaticsm, atleast not if a numismatic library is within reach! What about the norm of ones own country (if they are clearly lined out)? First; working ones way through the monetary history, one will meet a lot of cases were no rules has been put up, two; who will use your database if you do not belong to either the anglo, german or french language groups?

The solution I suspect many of us choose is to play on several horses. We set out to use what often is naively thought of as standardized english terms which often really are latin-english, german-english or likewise. Habbits of spelling introduced  by historians and numismatists based in different camps.

To meet the demands of computerized numismatics it would be very helpful to have anything close to a standard code for how to spell historical and numismatical information in our databases. How pleasant it may be to think this information is compiled and easily available in catalogues for most areas and epoces, this is not the case!
1) One seldom has access to a library which have all important work in stock; 2) different scholars catalogueing the same field does not allways use the same spelling;
3) the task is uncoverable for a limited staff (with limited time) within reasonable time;
4) who can better make up a list of Catalonian mints, issuers and denominations and the the accepted way of spelling than the Catalonians themselves (secondary: a outside connoisseur of Catalonian historiy and numismatics).

It may be simple-sounding, but one solution to this situation would be that numismatic scholars in the respective countries and areas compiled such list for their own area. There must be possible to list alternative spelling; e.g.  Oslo in Norway is referred to as both Oslo and Asloia in the middleages, Christiania in nyere tids history and finally Oslo again in more modern times. It should not either be required to work out full lists before they are beeing distributing. A list with 70 % of the informations compiled is far more better than nothing. The all important question of publishing can be tagged «possible in a future». Any participants are of course free to publish their own work at any time.

Having a set of multilingual codes available, one could take a relational database and use the codes as reference for all such information put in. A system like this are also ready to handle several set of references e.g. containing different languages codes. The availability would increase several times if anybody connected to network could choose between handling your database in e.g. english, german or spanish.

Who should coordinate such a big scale project? The Subcommittee for computerization is a strong candidate. But it can be anyone in a position working with numismatic computerization tilsluttet a collection or research institute. The question is rather if different scholars are willing to contribute!

Coins and Computer Newsletter, des. 1993


Gjengitt med tilatelse fra Myntkabinettet